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condescending

adjectivenounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkɔn.dɪ.sɛnd.ɪŋ//
  • United Kingdom//ˈkɔnˌdi.sɛnd.ɪŋ//
  • United States//ˌkɑndəˈsɛndɪŋ//

Assuming a tone of superiority, or a patronizing attitude.

adjective

  1. 1

    Assuming a tone of superiority, or a patronizing attitude.

    Quit talking to me in that condescending tone! You always treat me like a child!

    The housekeeper, a very decorative brunette of thirty-five with a pseudo-English accent, greeted him with a mixture of grateful effusion and condescending patronage.

    As for the IRP, Secretary of State Grant Shapps continues to peddle snake oil, smoke and mirrors. His reaction to near-universal IRP condemnation from politicians, local and national media, and all but a few rail specialists was to dismiss the lot of us (in the condescending and patronising tone we have now come to expect) as "critics and naysayers".

noun

  1. 1

    An act of condescension.

    Is it the condescendings of a great one that we see in Christ? "I am among you as one that serveth," says He.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of condescendpresent participle and gerund of condescend

Forms

plural
condescendings
comparative
more condescending
superlative
most condescending
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).